In 2018, Lindsay Ware decided to combine two of her interests – conservation biology and dog training – to found Science Dogs of New England. What started as an interest in helping hunters track game has grown into a range of dog-powered work that comprises conservation tracking, including helping scientists find – and, ultimately, protect – rare turtles. Lindsay lives in Ellsworth, Maine, and has three working dogs – one dedicated to tracking game animals and two trained in conservation scent detection.
I grew up in a very outdoorsy family and am originally from Coventry, Connecticut. I was always outside as a kid, always in the woods. My parents took us hiking and fishing and canoeing. That definitely influenced a lot of the work that I do now. We used to come up to Maine, camping and staying at my grandparents’ house in the Sebago area. I always loved Maine and kind of always wanted to end up here.
I can remember saying as a pretty young kid that I was going to be a wildlife biologist. I was really inspired by being around nature and being outdoors. I went to Unity College in Maine and earned a degree in wildlife biology. Then I went to the University of Western Ontario for my master’s, where I studied waterfowl. After school, I worked in temporary field positions, moving to different areas and working in the field collecting data. After I got my masters, I moved back to Maine and got into more laboratory science. And that wasn’t quite the science I wanted to be working on. I really wanted to be back out in the woods doing more wildlife biology or conservation biology.
That’s when I got into professional dog training, and it was an outlet for me, something that was more related to my interests. I got a puppy, and I started delving into training and just got really into it. I was taken on by a local training facility and eventually was the lead trainer for them. I did that as my night job. I decided to leave my laboratory job in 2017, and to combine dog training with conservation and wildlife biology. In 2018, I founded Science Dogs of New England.
When I started getting into dog training, I was also getting into hunting. I had a young Lab mix, Gander, and I really wanted to do something cool with him. As a hunter, I appreciated the idea of making sure that if an animal is hit, it’s found. I had heard that you could get a license in Maine to track and recover large game animals for hunters. I found the one person in Maine who was doing this at the time, a woman named Susanne Hamilton. I started following Susanne around to learn about it, and I got totally hooked on it. Since then, tracking has become totally different. There are so many more people doing it, and there are a lot more hunters on board with the method and recovering animals that way. These days, I do very little hunting. I’d rather go get the dog and do some tracking.
There might be a lot of reasons why a hunter can’t find an animal. We approach tracking like an investigation. We’re trying to figure out what happened, how badly the animal is injured – is it something they’re going to just have a flesh wound and survive from, or is it a mortal wound? We ask a million questions about angle and position and how high up they were in a tree stand or were they on the ground. We examine all the evidence they have found so far – do they have any blood, hair, bones? Often times we’re either recovering the animal or determining that the animal is not mortally wounded and is going to recover. These hunters that call us really, really care about these animals. If they hit an animal and can’t find it, that really bothers them.
My tracking dog is a German wire haired dachshund, Aldo. He’s 15 pounds, but don’t tell him he’s little. In the Maine woods, especially when we’re in the areas where we’re tracking bear and moose and it’s really, really thick, these little guys just get through everything. We’re an on-leash tracking state. Gander was a much bigger dog. He was great, but getting dragged by a 70-pound dog on a leash through the woods was a little intense. The little guys tend to be easier to handle, and they’re really close to the ground and can really get into the tracks of animals.
My other two dogs are conservation dogs – sometimes we call them conservation scent detection dogs. These dogs are trained in a specific field of scent detection. A lot of people are familiar with scent detection dogs related to law enforcement – for example, dogs that are trained to detect narcotics or explosives or human remains. Conservation detection is a type of scent detection, but the dogs are trained for biological targets.
We train the dog for whatever is needed by the researcher or conservationist or biologist that we’re working with. A conservation dog can be trained to find a rare species of plant or, on the flip side of that, an invasive species that we want to remove from an area. One really popular application is training dogs to find animal scat, because biologists can find so much amazing information in scat – they can get DNA, diet, hormones. It’s like gold to researchers. A dog can be trained on one specific or several different specific species of scat. So they can ignore the moose scat and the deer scat and maybe just find that bobcat scat, or whatever it is they’re trained to find. They can be trained to find small animals that are hiding. They can be trained to find egg masses of insects.
The conservation detection community is constantly trying new things and exploring the limits of training dogs to find specific biological targets. Dogs are typically trained for many different targets. We actually don’t know the limits to how many targets a dog can have. There are some larger conservation dog groups that have dogs with upwards of 40 targets in their target library in their brain. And there have been no signs of any type of detriment to that dog’s ability to find all their targets if they have multiple targets. It’s amazing how dogs can just keep adding target odors.
The biggest project we work on is the Maine Wood Turtle Project, administered by an organization called the Center for Wildlife Studies. Wood turtles are a species of special concern here in Maine, and they’re just a really important conservation issue right now. So, I approached them, and we agreed to do this collaborative project to test the idea of using detection dogs for wood turtles, and it’s just grown. We’ve become a really tight-knit group and have expanded the project.
Chili Bean, my Labrador, is my primary turtle detection dog right now. Wood turtles are very terrestrial, and they spend a large chunk of the year hanging out on land. They’ve got this cryptic patterning on their shell. There have been times when there’s a wood turtle right in front of me, it’s not even buried in the vegetation, and it takes me a while to realize it’s there. I’ve seen them dug under grasses so much that I’ve had a dog indicating there’s a turtle there, and I have actually thought the dog is wrong. But when you’re finding something via scent, and some of that scent is coming up, the dogs can pinpoint them and tell us that they’re there.
I have two dogs trained for that work. Their job is basically to be working the area, sniffing around for scent in the air, working to the source of any scent they get a whiff of. Then they perform a behavior – which we call an alert or an indication – to tell us they’ve found something. My dogs both lie down next to it and point their nose toward it. Once they’ve found their target, a dog is rewarded for that work. That reward is based on that particular dog and what their favorite thing is. Chili Bean loves to play tug, and she has a toy that is her very favorite tug toy. So, when she does that behavior, when she’s done, I call her away, and we play tug.
The turtle project takes up most of our time. We’re now training Chili Bean to detect the nests of the wood turtles, which are underneath the substrate, and you have no idea that they’re there. We’re looking to expand turtle work to other projects and organizations as well, and potentially to other areas of New England. I really love the turtle work. I think it’s really interesting, and there’s so much concern right now with turtle species. I think dogs can do a lot of really good work in the turtle world.
The purpose of finding the turtles is to get a better grasp on their habitat and to get a better understanding of their population dynamics. They do put radio transmitters on some of the turtles. They’ve had radio transmitted turtles on that project for years, so they have many years of data. But sometimes Chili Bean will find a full grown adult, and the researchers have never seen it before, so then they wonder if the turtle is coming in from another area, or if it’s just been avoiding researchers all these years.
Conservation dogs have different strengths and weaknesses. Chili Bean is the dog you want when you’re working a huge area, because she can really sweep very large areas. But she’s not always the most detail-oriented dog. My other dog, Delta, is an Australian shepherd, and she is my detail dog. I work with her a lot on targets where you need a dog that is really going to slow down and sniff every inch and be really careful. She’s also my people person dog, so she’s become our outreach dog. We’ll talk with kids and teach them about conservation and conservation dogs. Whenever we do a public presentation or demonstration, that’s Delta. She loves it. Chili Bean is not your typical Labrador retriever. She just wants to be out working, so she’s fine letting Delta go to these events and meet people. That’s part of why Chili Bean is so good at her job; if she’s out working and people come up and talk to us, she won’t get distracted by them. She just wants to go find the turtle.
It’s challenging work. I think sometimes people might think, “Oh, you’re just walking in the woods with your dogs.” And, honestly, it’s my version of walking in the woods with my dogs, and I love it. But it’s very, very physically demanding, and it’s very mentally demanding as well. When I’m out with a conservation dog – if someone’s asking me a question and I’m trying to answer it and I’m watching the dog, I’m multitasking. It may not look like it, but I’m trying to hold a conversation while watching my dog work. There’s so much going on with interpreting your dog and working with your dog and the tracking on top of it. Tracking is just so physical.
Working with dogs offers a method to get more data for conservation research and to try to solve some problems that maybe we couldn’t solve before. Dogs are not the solution for every single conservation thing, and there are some projects that aren’t really a great fit for dog work. But dogs can also be a solution where nothing else has worked. In some cases, dogs can make the work a lot more efficient. You only have so much time and so much funding to work on projects and be out there helping these species that need help. If we can contribute to that and increase the amount of good that is coming from that, that’s super rewarding.
On a personal level, you’re doing it with your buddies, your dogs. They’re not just your dogs, but they’re your coworkers, and you learn so much about what’s going on out there by watching a dog. When you know their body language and understand what they’re doing, and understand when they’re smelling something – it’s amazing. Dogs are experiencing the natural world way differently than we do, just being able to use their noses the way they do. Just to get a little bit of insight into that is really neat.
One thing I love about training dogs is that you might think you have something figured out, and then something different happens, or you get a new dog that completely challenges everything you’ve ever learned about dog training and the way you do it. That’s how conservation science has always been to me – you’re always learning more. And with dog training, you’re always learning something new. I’ve been doing tracking for over ten years now, and then I’ll do a track that doesn’t follow any of the rules that I’ve learned about what an animal should be doing, or where they should be going, or how they should be acting. I guess you could find that frustrating, but I think it’s so neat. You never stop learning. And the dog never stops learning. They’re learning and getting better all the time, I’m learning and getting better all the time. And with the conservation aspect, we’re learning more all the time about how we can use dogs for conservation. It’s so cool.
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